#2
Now I'm here. Days later. Maybe a week. The cold has sunk so deep into me that warmth feels like a concept from a book I read once—I understand the word but I can't access the feeling.
My lips are cracked and bleeding at the corners.
My eyes feel gritty from lack of sleep. Every time I close them I see the shipping container or the locked cabin or Tyler's face when he smiled and told me I belonged to him now, his voice so calm and reasonable, like he was explaining something obvious to a child.
I wonder if the other women got out. I wonder if they're safe or if they're still in that container or if they've been moved somewhere worse.
I wonder if anyone even noticed I was gone from the café.
Probably not. I was just the shy waitress who kept to herself.
Easy to forget. Easy to replace. The kind of person whose absence leaves a gap the size of a coffee cup.
A tear slips down my cheek and I wipe it away fast with the back of my hand.
Crying is a waste of water and it makes my nose run and then I have to sniffle and that's noise.
I can't afford noise. I can't afford weakness.
But I'm so tired. My body feels like wet paper that's about to tear along every fold.
I shift my weight and pain flares in my ankle again.
I bite my lip hard enough to taste fresh copper.
The snow has drifted against the opening of my little hollow, half covering the branches I stacked for cover.
Through the gap I can see the forest stretching out in every direction.
White ground. Dark trunks. Gray sky. It's beautiful in a way that feels cruel—like a painting of the place where you're going to die.
I think about my apartment above the café.
The little kitchen with the yellow curtains I found at a thrift store.
My collection of mugs shaped like animals that I bought one at a time when I had extra tip money—the cat, the owl, the hedgehog with the tiny painted smile.
The way the radiator clanked every morning and woke me up before my alarm, grumbling like an old man who didn't appreciate being needed.
I even miss the double shifts. I miss having problems that were the size of sore feet and runny eggs.
I would give anything to have those problems back.
A low creak sounds from somewhere to my left. I freeze. My heart jumps so hard it sends a spike of pain between my ribs. I hold my breath and listen. The wind. The trees. Then another sound—not a creak this time. A crunch. Like a boot stepping on packed snow.
My whole body goes rigid. I press myself deeper into the rocks until the sharp edges dig into my spine through the soaked polyester. I don't move. I don't breathe. I just listen, every nerve pulled tight as wire.
Another crunch. Closer.
I can't see much through the gap in my shelter.
Just a narrow slice of white ground and dark trees.
But something moves between two trunks about twenty yards out.
A shape. Tall. Broad through the shoulders in a way that takes up too much space between the pines.
Dark clothing that blends with the shadows under the canopy.
He has a beard, thick and dark, and his hair is cut short on the sides with a little more length on top.
He moves like he knows exactly where he's going.
Not wandering. Not lost. Moving with the kind of purpose that belongs to someone who considers this mountain his own living room.
My stomach drops so fast I feel the berries threatening to come back up.
It's one of them. It has to be. Tyler sent someone.
Or one of Dale's men survived whatever happened at the mine and tracked me here.
The man is big enough to be a threat just by existing, the kind of big that makes doorways seem like design flaws.
He's wearing a jacket that looks tactical. It’s heavy, dark, and built for exactly this kind of terrain.
Something glints at his hip when he turns slightly.
Metal. A badge or a gun or both. It doesn't matter which because either one means someone with authority over whether I live or die.
I bite down on my knuckle so hard I feel the skin split.
My body is shaking. They’re violent, involuntary tremors that rattle my teeth and make the dry branches around me shift and whisper.
The cold and the fear have fused into a single thing and I can't separate them anymore.
My mind races through every terrible ending.
He finds me. He drags me out of the rocks.
He takes me back to Tyler or to whatever is left of the operation.
They punish me for running. They make sure I can never run again.
The man stops. He turns his head slowly, scanning the trees the way a predator reads a landscape. He looks like he was carved from the same granite as the ridge behind him. Strong. Capable. The kind of man who doesn't need to rush because he already knows how this ends.
He takes another step. Then another. Each footfall deliberate and steady.
He's moving toward my hiding spot. Not directly—he's following something on the ground.
Tracks. My tracks. The ones I tried to cover by dragging a branch behind me but probably only made more obvious because I've never had to hide from anything more dangerous than a difficult customer.
My hand closes around the sharp rock I've been keeping beside me since the second day.
It's the only thing I have that could pass for a weapon—a flat piece of granite about the size of my palm with one jagged edge that I used to cut strips from my apron and to scrape bark off a stick I'd been sharpening into something I told myself was a spear but looked more like a sad pencil.
The rock is cold in my grip and not nearly enough but it's all I've got.
He's fifteen yards away now. Maybe twelve.
Close enough that I can hear his breathing—steady and even, the breathing of a man who hasn't been running for his life.
Close enough that if I don't move in the next few seconds, he'll be standing right over my shelter looking down at me like I'm an animal in a den.
I could run.
The thought fires through my brain hot and electric.
The trees are thick to my right. If I bolt now, while he's still a few strides out, I might get enough of a head start to disappear into the deeper woods.
My ankle screams at the idea but adrenaline is a powerful liar and right now it's telling me I can do anything, go anywhere, outrun a man twice my size through waist-deep snow in cracked sneakers with a sprained ankle. Adrenaline is an idiot.
But staying means being found. Staying means whatever comes next is out of my hands completely. Staying means trusting that the rocks will hide me when I already know they won't because he's reading my trail like a book and the last page leads right here.
I shift my weight to my good leg. The branch pile beside me creaks. If I go I have to go now—right now—before he clears the last stand of pines and has a direct line of sight to the hollow.
I push up to a crouch.
And my ankle buckles.
Not a little wobble. A full collapse, the joint folding sideways with a white flash of pain so sharp that the air leaves my lungs in a sound I can't swallow fast enough—a short, broken gasp that cuts through the quiet like a handclap.
I go down hard on one knee. The rock slips from my fingers and tumbles out of the hollow, skittering across the snow and coming to rest in plain view, three feet from the opening of my shelter, as obvious as a signpost.
The footsteps stop.
Silence. Total. The kind of silence that has a physical texture, thick and suffocating, like the mountain itself is holding its breath to see what happens next.
I'm on my knees in the dirt with my only weapon lying in the snow outside my reach and a sound I can't take back still ringing in the air between us.
My hands are shaking so badly I press them flat against the frozen ground just to make them stop.
I can feel him out there. Not moving. Not leaving.
Just standing at the edge of my little world, deciding.
I close my eyes and press my forehead against my knees. My breath comes in shallow sips that taste like blood and cold air and the particular flavor of knowing it's over.
Please don't see me. Please keep walking. Please let me disappear into the snow and the rocks and the cold until none of this is real anymore.
But I heard the footsteps change direction. One step. Two. Coming toward the sound I made, toward the rock lying in the snow like a dropped confession.
The branches above my hollow shift. Daylight floods in, gray and blinding after the shadows. A shape blocks it almost immediately—massive shoulders, dark beard, eyes that find me instantly and hold.
I am crouched in a hole in the ground in a ruined dress with no weapon and no way to run and a stranger looking down at me like he's just found something he wasn't expecting to find. Not surprised. Not smug. Something else entirely. Something I'm too scared and too starved and too broken to read.
I don't scream. I don't have the strength for it. I just sit there on my knees in the dirt and wait for whatever comes next, because the mountain has made its decision and taken every choice I had left.
The last thing I see before the tears blur everything is the rock lying useless in the snow between us, already half-buried and sinking.
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